Is IT business for men only? The situation is changing! Several initiatives are working to increase the proportion of women in the IT sector.
Provided by Deutsche Welle
April 22 in Germany is a special day for everyone interested in information technology – Girls' Day. Its task is to draw the attention of middle and high school students (from the 5th grade) to the prospects in the field of IT. Unfortunately, at the moment there are still more guys than girls. On a German campus, there are three students for every IT student. And this is at the time of admission! The further, the greater the disproportion becomes even greater.
What about the industry itself? In Germany, the share of women in the IT industry is currently below 17 percent. This is much less than in a number of other states. In the United States, for example, it is 26 percent, in Canada – 25 percent, and in Australia – even 28 percent. Several initiatives launched in Germany aim to change the situation and make it so that women are no longer rare in the German IT market.
For gender balance in digital
While almost half of all German university students are girls, in 2019 (this is the latest data of this kind) only about 15 percent of computer science final exams were taken by female students. According to the Federal Employment Agency, in general, among specialists in the field of MINT (mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology) in 2019 there was a clear predominance of men: for 8 million representatives of this professional group, there were only 1.3 million women.
Professor Katharina Hölzle, Chair of Information Technology Entrepreneurship and Ombudsman for Women at the Hasso Platner Institute, School of Design Thinking at the University of Potsdam, and Lucia Hartig, Co-founder of German Women in Tech are convinced that in order to end the gender inequality in the digital world, it is necessary to rethink the methods of teaching informatics in educational institutions and to take measures to ensure gender balance in IT companies.
According to Katharina Hölzle, in the modern world, when solving global issues, network thinking, devoid of cultural, religious, gender prejudices, as well as the integration of various points of view, is of fundamental importance. And, logically, this requires cooperation, and not delimitation of male and female professional groups, argues the professor, who opposes one-sidedness in the development of computer science. Moreover, according to her, this is not so much about career opportunities for women, but about what kind of digital society we want to have in the future.
According to Lucia Hartig, the curricula of computer science departments should be designed with an eye to the individual needs and preferences of students – for example, take into account the fact that girls, due to their inherent psychological qualities, are more inclined to study social informatics and analysis rather than the details of the development of Lego robots. web data. Katarina Hölzle and Lucia Hartig talk about all this and much more in a special podcast.
Children should comprehend the basics of computer science already in childhood, supporters of increasing the proportion of women in the IT field are convinced. In their opinion, it is necessary to pay attention to the involvement of not only boys, but also girls in the process of studying technical sciences already in preschool institutions and in primary schools. And the key to this will be the optimization of educational programs.
Vivien Schiller has made an atypical career in information technology for a woman. She is a Senior Software Engineer at the Dortmund-based consulting and IT company Adesso. Her area of expertise is computer security. However, not only that. Vivienne is also an active advocate for the empowerment of women in the IT field.
Vivienne started advocating for gender equality in the IT industry while still a student, when she got the opportunity to do an internship at Adesso. It was after the girl got into this company that she founded the initiative to support women programmers “She for IT”. Today Vivienne is leading this project with her colleague Angela Carell. The girls host a podcast highlighting the problems of women in the IT market, and also do their best to establish close relationships between the employees employed at Adesso. According to Vivienne, concepts such as communication and mutual assistance are relevant for women in the IT industry today more than ever.
“Women” theme in German concerns
Meanwhile, a number of large German companies are already making significant steps towards achieving gender balance among employees. So, in 2015, the Mercedes automobile concern launched its own program “She's Mercedes”. The goal of this project is to highlight the problems a woman faces in Mercedes and find ways to solve them. Other German concerns, such as SAP, Bosch, Vodafone, Deutsche Bahn, are also raising the “female” theme in the field of information technology. They launched a campaign to increase the proportion of women in the IT field under the slogan “She transforms IT”.
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Author: Natalia Koroleva
